Wow, is it really that difficult to click "launch profile in a new browser"? I mean I know we're all becoming spoiled brats over time, but to consider a click or two "unusable" is truly beyond the pale.
Nobody is "prohibited" from doing so. You want a Firefox that lets you do whatever you want, you can easily use an unbranded or pre-release build, or even roll your own or use someone else's lightly-tweaked fork. Nobody owes you an officially supported product that's for a wide audience and is also a complete free for all. Even Ubuntu and other Linux distros require you to opt into third-party software channels. You just don't like the specific choice that Mozilla is giving you, but it's still very easily there.
Those modems should no longer be being used, period. If someone cannot afford a replacement and has an incompetent ISP incapable of providing them with a subsidized replacement, then that is a separate problem that needs addressing as soon as possible.
Perpetuating it won't do, and if in doing so we're perpetuating a larger impending security issue, then we need to resolve it stat, not defer everything because there is heaps of old hardware lying around.
That may be easy to say and harder to resolve, but there comes a time when problems need to be resolved. Maybe that won't be 2020, if the desired timeline proves unrealistic, but two years is plenty of time to move on it. It generally takes far longer to deprecate and remove protocols from the web than it does to get a replacement modem.
Assuming that device is actually worth accessing, then you could still keep and use an old version of a browser for that purpose. Newer browser versions should be pushing the web forward where possible.
Again, I have to wonder what divisions in Apple you're talking about. The folks I know working on WebKit practically have zero decision making power. It's all about saving face and keeping Safari viable as the only engine on iOS.
I get the impression that people claiming that companies like Apple are "engineering-driven" are only talking about their new, non-core projects. But then my perceptions are only colored by the folks I know working at those companies, so whatever.
Not in any of the areas I'm familiar with. For instance they can't even fix long-standing standards-compliance bugs or other interop issues in Blink or YouTube or Google Search... they're way too busy pushing redesigns and features that will help them keep their tenuous performance leads on their own web properties.
They have very intelligent and capable folks trying to "do no evil", but ultimately they're a business, not a charity. They rarely actually care about their engineers' opinions unless it helps with public image or maintaining a competitive edge (no matter how artificially) or helping them start a new product line (or close one that isn't paying the bills).
Thankfully I will say that it sounds like there is just enough blowback over the past two or three years that it's not all bad. But it's certainly not a place that I would call "run by engineers", and hasn't been for at least 4 years now.
Not really, Firefox and Chrome supported the picture element well before Safari did. It was part of the nascent HTML5 standard.
I believe what WebKit introduced was the analogous CSS image-set property, which likely influenced the picture's element's development (but image-set still hasn't managed to escape draft-spec territory).
No, he wasn't. He wasn't accepted as CEO by enough employees, but he could have stepped down and retained another position in the company, like CTO. Even he recognizes that Mozilla leadership wanted him to stay on board, but he chose to quit and pursue his own project. Which is fine. It just doesn't mean he was "forced" out any more than the people who quit because they couldn't stand him being CEO were "forced" out.
By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different.
>where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage
They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to.
>the way that they worship at the feet of Google
Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before.
>The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have
Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate.
>Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser.
They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture".
Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers.
>We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.
It strikes me as intriguing that people think there was ever a "severe backlash" over Pocket, let alone that it was what would have caused Mozilla to buy Pocket. Why would they not have bought it right away if that was the case? For that matter, why would they have bought it at all?
I fear you're vastly overestimating the effects a few people had on Mozilla's decision to experiment with, then buy a company that could help them potentially gain some actual influence over content-makers and the ad industry, and hopefully reduce their utter reliance on Google's money.
At best, the only thing the criticism over Pocket accomplished was to hasten Mozilla's pre-existing desire to develop these kinds of features as (what became) Test Pilot extensions.
Feel free, but I don't see why you would draw the conclusion that your money is not needed from what I said (even if Firefox has enough revenue to work with for now, your donations keep the whole organization viable as-is; you're just not directly donating to Firefox).
No, you really don't. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, who are the non-profit parent company who do these kinds of things, not build Firefox. Firefox is made by their subsidiary Corporation, who cannot accept your donations.
The Corporation doesn't even need your donations anyway; they make a lot more revenue than the donations Mozilla receives.
However, the more you donate, the larger the whole company is allowed to grow while legally being a non-profit. Also, the more is donated, the more they are allowed to transfer between the Foundation and the Corporation.
But you are still not ultimately donating to Firefox. You are donating to the Foundation, who need the money more in the first place so that the whole can legally remain a non-profit, even if they earn more revenue.
Whether or not you feel they should have more money to work with is up to you, but I note that quite a few people seem to wish that Mozilla could do pie-in-the-sky stuff like manage their own user clouds and VPNs and search engines while not remaining motivated by shareholder profits.
Sadly, in general this is a case of "we made a Chrome-specific site/app years ago because it was the easiest thing to do, and despite other browsers and some of our employees working hard since then to standardize the Chrome-specific bullshit, it doesn't benefit us enough to bother fixing anything on our end. So we'll just keep maintaining our subpar now-redundant versions for non-Chrome browsers instead."
But luckily this attitude might be poised to change, because the employees at Google who still care about these things have been pushing hard, and it's now threatening to become a PR issue that Google is needlessly serving inferior versions of big apps to other browsers. When other browsers are a UA spoof away from showing that you're artificially screwing with them on your base Search engine, it becomes harder to push those browsers to adopt the web standards you're trying to push to make YouTube "better".
Not quite, but new and unproven features are supposed to be hidden behind a runtime flag to prevent a hot mess like what was caused with CSS/JS vendor prefixes.
The Blink team are getting better at this, but they still really need to put their feet on the brakes a little more, and wait until there are at least two implementations ready before flipping their own switch to enable the feature for all of their users.
With two reasonably complete (and independent) implementations it's far more likely that the standard is engine-neutral, and not lacking in crucial detail. The web platform tests will also have been put to the tests to ensure that they have decent coverage. On top of that, the feature can be considered to have been vetted to ensure that it isn't really just being shoved on the web to meet Google's business needs, but rather in the interests of a broader set of people. These things can easily slip if pushed too quickly, even if others are generally supportive of the general idea of the feature.
Very few people can devote the significant time necessary to make free professional-grade stuff just for the sake of a wider audience.
And unless you're an artist who does that yourself, it's a bit much to ask others to meet your needs for free like that in the first place.
If non-dev artists want to see that gap close, they need to contribute, not just wait for mana from heaven.
No, that doesn't have to mean actually writing the software. But it could mean paying someone else to do the coding, even if the software is ultimately released as OSS.
I honestly don't remember the actual message from Mozilla varying much over the past two years when it comes to Vimperator-needed APIs. But then I don't remember anyone doing much to get things figured out on that front, so a lack of progress is hardly surprising to me.